That depends on what you do with it. It could just be two fixed forms per talisman, that’s not more tedious than ring swapping.
Just won this game! I would have probably gone for more runes, but a funny bug nuked my max HP while I was in Tomb:1. Thanks PleasingFungus for the quick fix!
Right from Turn 1, Beast Form trivializes the game. I o-tabbed my way to Lair as a Felid without really any stress. Having banged my head against various flavours of melee felids in the past, this was a completely different experience.
I found Maw Form and Serpent Form very early, before Lair! Serpent Form proved to be very strong in melee, and the constriction melee attacks really squeezes out extra damage when it is most needed. However, losing the Felid speed in the early game is not something I could bring myself to accept. The moment something hit hard, it made it very difficult to run away, especially with how many turns it took to untransform.
I tried Maw Form next, but it proved to be quite disappointing. The healing was almost imperceptible. Maybe completely imperceptible… is it bugged? At least the speed is preserved… I ended up swapping back to Beast Form to clear the rest of Lair. Maybe if the healing was on-hit and not on-death, Makhleb style?
After spamming some Gozag shops in Lair as I always do, I lucked out on a Granite Talisman in a jewelry shop. Honestly, losing max HP as the penalty for not having enough skill is laughable. Even with a 50% penalty, this is such a titanic improvement over regular melee Felid there’s little reason not to upgrade to it immediately (and hard-focus the Shapeshifting skill).
This carried me brainlessly all the way to deep Vaults, at which point I found Dragon Form. This, with Vhi’s Electric Charge, made me repeatedly one-shot iron dragons and titans. I also had Manifold Assault for those occasional spicy creatures you don’t want to hang around with for too long.
At this point, it was basically a regular Transmutations run, with the added bonus of not having to constantly recast (love this so much) and also being immune to purple draconians’ quicksilver breath (which dispel forms in the current stable branch).
I found Storm Form in the Elven Halls:3 mega-vault, which is just as insane as it was before. I went into Crypt under Gozag wrath, blinkbolted in an open space, held down TAB and saw Mennas flash for a single frame on my monitor before he got expunged out of reality.
I also tried Lich Form for a little bit… and when it comes to Felids, this just isn’t the one. The melee debuffs are interesting but simply cannot compete with Dragon and Storm. The active ability is amusing, but the range on it is very small for its ludicrous 20 MP cost (and this range should be indicated in the ability description). I also very much miss the Necromancy spell enhancer on it - why was it removed? Honestly, I see no real purpose to this form aside from the anti-torment extended characters love. I would not imagine most players using any of Lich Form’s passives and active aside from being able to clear Tomb/Hells/Pandemonium without worry. It’s also kind of sad to see Kiku lose a bit of their identity as a side effect. I wonder if Lich Form could be Kiku’s capstone, with another late-game form to replace the talisman.
I wonder if Wereblood is still in the game, I struggled so hard to find it and simply could not. It would have made this whole thing even crazier.
Overall, Transmuter’s early game went from mediocre to berserker-tier. Transmuter’s end game went from amazing to unstoppable. The skill penalty causing a loss in max HP is mostly laughable.
To really drive that last point home, after the bug hit me and caused me to have 0 skill levels for any of my forms, I still finished clearing the entirety of Tomb:1 (except the death inner corridors) as a 35 max HP Storm Form Felid. Everything dies so fast to Manifold Assault that there is no real risk besides an unlucky triple-smite.
Love the way this rework is going. The talisman spawn rate seems just right - I found everything about at the point where it should be found, and had all possible talismans by Elf:3. Maybe they are a little on the “too common” side. If I rewrote my FeSu meme guide with this branch, it would be completely doable to suggest a completely different god since milking Gozag for Forms is no longer really a necessity.
Okay here is my talisman suggestion 
- Movement delay -3aut
- AC +3
- Armour provides half base AC
- 1d10 auxiliary attack on every melee attack
- inability to wear boots
- +10% hp
- -20 to stealth when not flying
- attacks normally from shallow water
- requires less skill to wield shields effectively
- requires less skill to wield bows effectively
- able to equip centaur barding
2 Thanks
I think it’d be more interesting and less spoilery than having to carefully pick your form in advance.
Again, I’m not married to 5-turn untransforms for forms, but it’s not at all obvious to me that being able to quickly untransform is more interesting. Being able to quickly swap items tends to lead to a lot of micro-optimizations (e.g. ring swapping) that eat a bunch of player time without creating interesting or exciting moments. We could try quick untransforms at some point, but I’m not optimistic.
I definitely don’t want to add anything else that feels like ring swapping. Ring swapping is fiddly and annoying enough as it is!
I’m also very curious about what you think is “spoilery” here. Could you elaborate?
@Aiyanna: hm, hope you don’t mind if I remove your suggestion and replace it with an armadillo talisman? 
1 Thank
Probably because you don’t know what’s you’re gonna fight in a branch.
Let’s say that Ice Form was present. You wouldn’t know what enemies had fire attacks. Obviously ice form got r-worded, but you have {resistances from all armour slots}, {resistances you’d gain from a different form}, dragon form rC-, etc.
1 Thank
Hm. Is plate armour of rC spoilery? How do you evaluate +6 egoless plate vs +2 plate of rC without knowing all enemies that are in a branch?
1 Thank
I was just thinking about statue form and LRD, which isn’t like -rC or -rF where it’s kinda clear that you want to even that out.
Really minor point though. That’s why I wrote “spoilery” and not “is a spoiler”. Sorry if I didn’t distinguish that enough. There’ll always be some things that are spoilery, because it’s always better to know exactly what to expect.
A single ring swap isn’t meaningfully more fiddly than item usage, with some good item_slot settings.
So I’d think it’s just a question of frequency, something that can be fixed with whatever is your favorite kind of cooldown, if it’s perceived as tedious.
Also, if you’re playing a shapeshifter, you chose this. If some form swapping or untransforming is too fiddly for someone, isn’t that what a regular melee dude is for?
Just got my second shapeshifter win! Things went a lot better when I trained UC/fighting instead of shapeshifting.
While picking up a decent weapon D1 (qstaff, sblade, >+0 dagger) is still better than using UC with starting skill, training UC for a even little bit changes that equation. Previous stuff I said about go weapon is probably wrong unless it’s a very good weapon.
You really want to ignore shapeshifting until it’s very cheap or you find a new talisman. The benefits of extra training beyond minimum are very slight, at least for early forms. (compare the +1 slay per 2ish? shapeshifting to the +1 base dam and acc per 1 UC, and add in that shapeshifting apts are dogshit)
I would kind of like this to be different.
I think the current scheme where you invest in UC until you have a new talisman to train for makes it less interesting to swap off UC if you find a great weapon. If you’re still on beast form you likely have minimal shapeshifting skill, so it will often make sense to drop shapeshifting entirely rather than trying for granite form or death form to support your weapon.
It’s also a little cumbersome in that you tend to have a period of skill training with minimal benefit between getting your shiny toy and getting to use it.
On the forms-
Beast form is good enough to take you through lair and orc comfortably, and you can handle S branches with it depending on how much your apts favor UC/fighting and if you get good body armor/have strong species benefits. It might still be too strong tbh.
Maw form fails to impress. I think beast form is better for most chars, the exception being those without a body armor slot, and does not require 9 Shapeshifting skill. Absolutely do not use on ogres, it’s super terrible.
Serpent form is almost definitely too strong. It’d be really rough, but you could definitely win the game with serpent form and two good rings. More compellingly, it’s easily enough to get you through S branches and slime or abyss- though vaults or depths you start to really feel the missing resistances.
Blands is definitely too strong. I would value blands over granite form based on numbers; it’s better offensively, if you have good gear it’s better defensively, and you aren’t slow.
It’s also 9 skill to get running!
I won my second game with blands- MeSh, I had picked up both S runes and Slime and was finishing D12-15 and the moment I found blade hands I dove the last two floors of D, the entirety of U, and Zot. There were two moments of trouble which would have been very avoidable with earlier consumable use or simply not walking dumb places, but damage was not at all an issue and defenses were not at all an issue.
I’d propose for a nerf making it’s base dam very lackluster at minimum skill, scaling up heavily with shapeshifting. This lets you treat blands as akin to a build in and of itself- acceptable, since it doesn’t remove the armour itemization game like other talismen do, nerfs it heavily if you don’t invest heavily, and still lets you play Big Armour Shapeshifter.
I have yet to get granite form; the one time I have seen it I could not afford it and then went and won with blands.
Dragon form is good; I have not used it since the hp penalty was changed but before then you could get it online extremely early and win lair and S branches for free. I need to give dragon form another shot with a greater dex focus; pumping strength is funny and I give in to the temptation of Big Number, but you really do need that EV.
Have not gotten death form online.
Have not used storm form since the nerf.
2 Thanks
Here are some of my thoughts after my first attempt with DrSh: https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/lowfye/morgue-lowfye-20230706-171646.txt
My very first attempt on this branch was DrSh that got to XL17 on Snake 4 then died. I started with beast form and UC+Fighting training, felt pretty good till I found Blade talisman on D5. I started using it once I was at about ~7 skill (well before lair) reducing my HP by around 10, but the damage is incredibly strong. Once I got Blade talisman fully online (aided by Ashenzari), I don’t think there could have been another Str weapon with better damage rating, and by the end of the run I had about 90 damage rating at 0.6 speed.
I found Serpent and Granite form along the way, but neither seemed worth switching to, the damage bonus from Blade talisman was far too great. Compared to its min skill competitor Serpent form, you gain some gear slots but lose some extra HP, AC, and Str. I did not try Maw this run, but the description page did not impress compared to Blade talisman. The damage bonus and gear slots from Blade talisman seemed to entirely supersede all the other benefits of the other talismans, at least until Dragon/Storm form.
Shapeshifting now feels more akin to a weapon playstyle than to a casting playstyle. Both Blade and Serpent talismans increase your spell failure rates, discouraging early-mid game swapping to/from casting, although I’m not sure if Maw also hits your spellcasting. Maw allows you to use a weapon though, clearly encouraging overlap with weapon users. I think it’s easier to move into talisman use or out of it as a weapon user than as a caster due to the stat overlap, whereas on trunk it’s easier to do as a caster. Overall I do still enjoy this playstyle change, and think it’s interesting, but losing the caster overlap is unfortunate because casting non-form spells is very fun.
The Shapeshifter background feels much more powerful now than the Transmuter on current trunk. This is probably due to some innate overpower in Beast talisman, and no longer needing Int, spell skill, nor MP to use your form abilities. I enjoy the background much more now, but I don’t see many scenarios where I would consider moving out of shapeshifting unless I couldn’t find a min skill 9 talisman by Lair or so. As a Shapeshifter, if an online min skill 9 talisman is achievable before or even in Lair, it seems like the only reason to consider not using it would be to maintain the ability to throw, spellcast, and some gear slots (species dependent). While losing these does create a real cost to being a talisman user, I don’t think they are big enough of a loss to justify not using the talisman in almost any case as Shapeshifter.
Additionally, throwing and spellcasting are interesting things to do in the game, and losing them in exchange for a talisman feels like an unfortunate trade off. TLDR is that Shapeshifter seems much less inclined to “hybridize” now than Transmuter is, and being in form all the time with 7.0(?) aut removal delay reduces the availability of interesting tactical decisions with throwing/spellcasting.
I do love not having to cast a form over and over again, and I like the HP reduction mechanic, it seems like a fair trade off and is discouraging in some circumstances. I noticed that the throwing skill has been moved below stealth, and I don’t think I like this location very much. Throwing scales with stealth or Str usually, but it’s also a consumable like evocations. It’s hard for me to think of the “best” place to put throwing skill, but honestly I would prefer to just have it below evocations and above shapeshifting. I can see potential reasons to keep it near stealth and in the weapon sided column though.
Finally, I like the idea of making talismans permanent somehow. I’m partial to making the talisman a permanent ability, mutation, or “inscription” of the character when it is evoked, and then the item is consumed. I like how this reduces inventory space and item management, and it makes sense with how forms cannot be dispelled now, making them appear “innate”. It seems like the main reason for not making them permanent is to make randart talismans, and I understand that randart talismans are going to remain the plan for now.
1 Thank
A minor suggestion, it would nice to add confirmation when eVoking talismans in the presence of monsters. Talismans share the same evoke UI with wands and misc evokers, and I found it pretty easy to misclick on a talisman when trying to evoke a wand. A misclick in this case means you lose 5 turns and most likely your run.
1 Thank
I’m posting this here in part to help jump start Tavern 2.0.
Super neat branch and concept, really follows on well with the Charms → Items transformation I headed up a while ago. This post is based on my two testing playthroughs, I’d like to do one more “lichformer” extendo DECj like the classic, but unclear if I’ll have any time. This post will start with the game recaps, then some specific nits, and finally some big picture concept feedback.
Buckle up this is a longpost.
Games
HuSh^Okawaru
- The start felt comfortable, though I didn’t find any tempting weapons before I found…
- Blade pretty early, even with hp penalty switched to it early and it carried most of the game; it definitely needs a further nerf relative to Anaconda and Maw, unless it’s meant to be slightly stronger (maybe a higher min skill (~11-12?)?).
- However, my perception might be skewed because I had two !exp on that char which I used to get blade early.
- Dragon form is dragon form. rarrrghghr im a dragon. I did chip-up to it to try it but there was a nontrivial tradeoff; if I hadn’t been testing since I had pretty good gear I might’ve put the xp in to armor, dodge, or even spells? Didn’t get a good feel for the blade spell penalty.
- Dragon form was definitely good enough, I didn’t press on and skill for storm, though I had the talisman, since I’d put so much xp into armour.
DrGl
- Started a non Sh to see how transitioning into forms using as a weapon wielder felt
- Found a pretty early Beast talisman; it was good until my auxes started filling in and I wanted the ac. It wasn’t until after finishing lair that I found a Maw talisman in D. This was my baby, Maw healing plus Makhleb healing was great. I forsee a lot of melee Dr and other no-body armor species picking up Maw, 9 skill isn’t too much and a 19 dam aux that heals is comfy.
- Didn’t try to force it, aimed my training at damage, defense, and utility skills, but once I found a Granite talisman I started nudging up Shapeshifting skill.
- Tried a bit of new Statue in extended settings. The char was pretty tanky but I am out of practice so I bailed. Felt solid. Never felt a desire to push on to death form.
User Interface
- Transforming with
Vis very smooth, the talisman descriptions being dynamic is excellent. - Form-related mutations aren’t described in
A(it would be nice, now that regular muts are). Not all of their short descriptions are particularly clear. The talisman description could be consulted but, as noted in the design, talismans don’t have to be carried after use. Further, while the form mutations do show up in green to indicate their source, this doesn’t appear to screen-reader and colorblind users, who might not realize which of these mutations in theAmenu are from their transformations. I think the easiest fix would be to have the mutation corresponding to the form (e.g.You are an undying horror.) have a description and just regurgitate the talisman description. - The location of talismans in the e
Voke menu can be cause for potential miskeys; I will probably start inscribing my talismans !v because they’re a likely miskey no matter the menu order, but it might be a sensible default (requested by other posters as well). - Currently I cannot untransform if I’ve dropped my talismans. This is a potential footgun for a new or awkward player. Consider the following action sequence: transform, melding an important item, drop talisman in confusion or a miskey, leave portal vault, suffer. “End transformation” should be available as an
ability. - On my DrGl Shapeshifting did not appear in the skill menu
mwith auto-hiding after picking up a beast talisman. I had to unhide the skill to start training it. - Message weirdness: when transforming from an untransformed state I get a non-sequitur “Your transformation has ended.”
_You begin transforming. You continue transforming. x3
Your transformation has ended.
_Your flesh twists and warps into a mockery of life!
Gameplay Feedback
This is ordered in order of implementable ease. I think I’ll have some real crawl dev time soon™ (week of Jul 24 and first week of August) if you want a hand, we could even do a crawl hackathon somewhere in SV.
Shapeshifter Background Weapon choice
Have you considered offering the Shapeshifter background a choice of weapon, instead of defaulting UC? I think most people would pick UC anyway, because that’s the “obvious spirit”, but it opens things up for a more flexible set of branching paths, considering there are forms in every tier that are compatible with weapon-usage.
Specific Form tweaks & adjustments
- A lot of body-armor restricted melee mans are going to want Maw… a Lot. Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.
- See the Blade nerf mentioned in the HuSh play through.
- The flavor of Maw is amazing, I love the body horror imagery. I haven’t looked in tiles but I hope the player dolls look appropriately hungry in this form.
- Death form seems a bit, over-the-top? underbaked? still hodge-podge? at the moment. I’m suspicious of a 20MP active, it reeks of power creep. But I haven’t yet play tested it so I don’t have a well-done suggestion yet.
Have talismans ID like magic staves and orbs
I want to have to sweat it out if two drop in different gauntlet branches.
Additional “transitional” forms, for mana munchers
I think with the background tweak above there will be good melee fluidity in the ability to pick up some shapeshifting if it makes sense, or bail on it when it stops. It seems a bit sad to me, though, that mana munchers get pretty left out of this. I’ll spitball with you on discord about some “spell support” form ideas to flesh this out, but here is where my thinking got:
- Offer an enhancer (bring back the necro enhancer kiku rasps); maybe this is a good place to put in archmagi in a way that makes its tradeoffs a more interesting choice when compared to mid-tier armour.
- Offer some kind of spell-reactive effect (damage on cast, some variation on the Ds malignant magic)
- Speedycasting?
- Delayed X (I know I know, it’s a bad idea but hear me out)
Ideally one of these can be weak enough to be an attractive early XP investment for a spell user who finds one on the floor. Or a Shapeshifter who finds one and their favorite spell book and wants to pivot.
Make talismans enchantable
Duplicate talismans feel like some missed design space. Unlike evokers, you can only use one at a time; and unlike staves and orbs there’s nothing “enchantable” in their stead. Giving each talisman a plus, having them enchantable (with ?EA or ?EW or merge those two) gives new strategic considerations:
- do I enchant my talisman now and reap the immediate benefit? or wait to get a +9 dragon talisman
- do I enchant my talisman or armour or a weapon? (more interesting for some characters than others)
- I found a +4 blade talisman, but I hadn’t been planning on blade; do I swap to it because its good and start training armour?
This also gives more room to have the +0 talismans a bit weaker (even with max training) and a larger numerical dimensionality to randart talismans.
This might be more headache to implement than payoff.
Portal-exclusive talismans
Ok this is just me getting wild now. Feel free to ignore this, there’s real substance elsewhere in the post. Since talismans don’t have to be carried, you could imagine one that cannot leave a portal (refuses to be picked up or whatever) and offers a unique “take this form now or never” experience.
Hope this is useful, happy to elaborate on things, and I’ll ping you about brainstorming spell forms.
9 Thanks
it would nice to add confirmation when eVoking talismans in the presence of monsters.
Sure, fair enough. Will put it on the list.
Thanks for the huge effortpost, ebering! I’ve already implemented some balance tweaks relevant to this post; trying to respond to most of the rest.
Form-related mutations aren’t described in
A(it would be nice, now that regular muts are).
Good fr. Note that you can look at the description for the status corresponding to your form (e.g. Statue) to re-read the form description (you can do this with a mouseover in tiles).
“End transformation” should be available as an
ability.
It was originally an ability. I removed it because it was literally the number one complaint I got from players: “why do you enter forms with V but leave them with a?”
This is a potential footgun for a new or awkward player. Consider the following action sequence: transform, melding an important item, drop talisman in confusion or a miskey, leave portal vault, suffer.
This is an impressive series of actions. If someone manages to do this, I will award them a prize. Until then, I will lose no sleep.
On my DrGl Shapeshifting did not appear in the skill menu
mwith auto-hiding after picking up a beast talisman. I had to unhide the skill to start training it.
Ooh, goodbug (well, oversight). I’ll fix.
Message weirdness: when transforming from an untransformed state I get a non-sequitur “Your transformation has ended.”
Another goodbug.
I think I’ll have some real crawl dev time soon™ (week of Jul 24 and first week of August) if you want a hand, we could even do a crawl hackathon somewhere in SV.
Ooh, exciting to hear you have dev time! I sadly am not available for a hackathon (I am in the 2-year-old-raising branch), but I appreciate the offer
Have you considered offering the Shapeshifter background a choice of weapon, instead of defaulting UC?
Yep, I did consider that! I opted not to, because I’d rather not add the extra friction of another start-of-game menu - that’s something we’ve been moving away from for a very long time, since the days of Chaos Knight god choices, mage book choices, etc.
I definitely see the argument for it, but I’m leaning against for now. Let me know if you think I’m overlooking something!
Have talismans ID like magic staves and orbs
Ha. Reasonable fr but I’ll leave that to you for now.
Additional “transitional” forms, for mana munchers
Something like this could definitely be fun! Sentei had some sketchy ideas for a parallel idea, a form for casters who want to transition more into melee and spend their MP on violence.
The current set of forms is very focused on giving upgrade paths for the Shapeshifter playstyle, in the way you describe re “melee fluidity”. I can believe there’s room for more forms, and that’d be a cool push for a second wave of shapeshifting changes, but it’s not what I’m focused on right now.
One interesting constraint here is that a spell support form would probably need to have a limited ‘min skill’, if you want non-melee chars to reasonably be able to pick one up in a 3-rune game. They won’t be interested in any earlier forms, so it’d be very hard to justify investing from zero to more than ~9 skill to start.
Make talismans enchantable
I’d suggested this, funnily enough! We had a big discussion about this in Discord before I even started implementing the branch. Feedback was very strongly negative. I still think it’s a fun idea, but maybe one best explored after other, more obviously fruitful ones.
Portal-exclusive talismans
Ha! This would fit well with the suggestion of making talismans dungeon features (like altars) instead of items. Making them truly unique forms sounds expensive - maybe we could do this with randarts?
1 Thank
Quoting the wiki entry:
Tactical forms do seem like they could work in some version of Crawl, but they’re too daunting a design challenge for me to attempt.
The existing form spells already are tactical, to an extend. It’s definitely possible to work around their other problems if you put your mind to it, or to preserve thier tactics in talsimans.
I think this rework just doesn’t set a good precedent. Shape swapping is an entire design space that you’re basically deciding should be given up. IMO if you don’t want to figure it out, you should leave that for future developers to handle, instead of replacing it with a new status quo.
Imagine for example, instead of reworking Necromancy, someone didn’t feel up to it years ago, so they removed Necromancy as a spell school and reworked Kiku into something that has similar gameplay to Yred, but with enough gimmicks and flavor differences to make it feel distinct.
Nobody is going to dig up the removed Necromancy school years later to rework the spells, let alone remove the new Kiku everyone got used to in favor of a rework of the old one.
Suggestion, to be constructive: Just leave all form spells in, along with the talismans. Transmutations for spell users who want them, Shapeshifting for everyone else.
Ok, just wanted to get this out there. Ignore this if it’s just me.
1 Thank
The start-of-game menu friction of weapon choices is friction, but in this particular case I think it is worth. Unlike a new start of game menu, this one would be one more instance of the same olde one. The complexity cost is almost completely already paid, is what I’m saying.
And the benefit is to make the background more of a background, just a little bit more flexibility for players to role-play, play the background in creative ways, generate lovely stories.
Everything else in this reply is about brainstorming so maybe we’ll not derail the feedback thread.
Are Sentei’s notes somewhere other than the discord feedback? Interested in riffing.
I had a mind to brainstorm a t1 form that was appealing to a spellmans, to draw them in a direction other than a buckler/shield.
The sky’s the limit! I’ll pay all sorts of prices for a cigotuvi inspired horror form you can only get rarely in the wizlab.
1 Thank
IMO, it would reduce the “identity” of the Tm / Sh. Dominant weapon for D:1 - D:3 would be spear. So it’d discourage using any future talismans you find. Also, one of the drawbacks of current Tm is the UC start. I worry that {Sh + weapon} would feel too similar to current monk. Beast Form is just a damage boost, so in playfeel, it’d feel mostly the same.
And, from the weapon selection menu, there’s wouldn’t be an indication that beast form fists are stronger than regular unarmed. It would be easy to never consider the UC option & pick a weapon because “weapon is better than UC” - even if the menu said beast fists or something.
EDIT: I didn’t realize that Beast Form’s UC bonus was removed
I think if the menu said “beast fists” and it was always a recommended option that would be enough of an indication.
Per Ebering’s request elsewhere, notes from discussion in Discord about hypothetical enchantment levels for talimans. (This discussion occurred between April 20 and 26th.)
Ge0ff (positive): “+1 for having enchantment levels. The boring/obvious function could be damage scaling. Another option is to lower the skill requirement. “I found a +9 dragon-form talisman before Lair and tabbed with it through all the S-branches until I splatted in the Vaults due to the lack of rC.””
Lici (negative): “No to enchantment options, feels weird without scrolls to use on them”
acrobat (negative): “I think giving talismans enchantment levels will make many randarts talismans bad(=less fun) as well as make harder to balance forms, but I’m not sure.”
I could have sworn there was more discussion, but I can’t find it now.
Some other thoughts:
- Plus: finding duplicate talismans feels less bad if they have different enchantment.
- Plus: as you noted, this might be a push toward using talismans you wouldn’t have otherwise. (On the other hands, talismans are pretty scarce right now, so rarity alone should do a pretty good job of that - if you’re waiting for a specific form, you might be waiting for a long time!)
- Minus: as you noted, many forms use enchantable equipment - weapons, armour, or sometimes both. If we make talismans enchantable, that makes those forms much weaker, since you’ll have to split your enchantment between them. This is a pain for balance and feel reasons.
- Minus: right now, there’s a reasonable strategic game in terms of deciding “do I skill up for a higher-tier talisman, or keep using a lower one? If I go for a higher-tier form, do I try to start using it before I’ve fully eliminated the HP penalties from underskill?” Adding enchantments complicates this, and I don’t know if the resulting decisions are richer or just muddier.
- Minus: I have no idea what plusses on talismans would do or how we’d balance them.
1 Thank
Shape swapping is an entire design space that you’re basically deciding should be given up.
Incorrect. Crawl still has several tactical forms - for example, !lignification’s tree form, or Dithmenos’s shadow form. I think it’s very possible that we’ll continue to add more of these.
The path that I’m moving away from is using spells to enter forms. We’ve made many similar changes in the past. For example, a few years ago, we moved most temporary buffs out of spells into items and removed the Charms school and Skald background. Much longer ago, we moved Divinations spells into a new god and axed that school, too.
Crawl would certainly be a worse game if the developers of that time had abdicated their responsibilities and punted those changes to a hypothetical ‘later’.
Players have a natural aversion to ‘removal’, because it feels like one is losing something. This is incorrect. Everyone is gaining something - a more fun game
3 Thanks
Tree form is a consumable, and shadow form is one ability of one god. Consumable ideas and god ideas have space constraints and a lot of competition, so I struggle to imagine that there’s going to be meaningfully more shape swapping. But if I’m going to be proven wrong about that, this indeed counters my point.
I think it was good as a part of a character archetype, because more distinct archetypes give people more choices to play to their individual preferences. But I guess that’s not part of the design philosophy.
Divinations wasn’t a tactical design space afaik, and the possibilities of Charms had a lot of overlap with Transmutations, so I don’t think their removals compare.
You are losing something in every removal. The bias is that the loss is overvalued.
It’s possible to overcompensate for that anti-removal-bias, especially if people are afraid to be accused of it. Developers also naturally have a bias when they have an idea for a new thing.
I agree that in DCSS removals very often ended up making the game more fun, but it’s a bad idea to become complacent about that.
I’ve found myself having a really hard time as a Shapeshifter going from beast form into another form. The new forms require a lot of skill and the talismans are pretty rare, so it’s kinda hard to go into them, plus I find that the slaying received can quickly become outvalued by auxiliary armor slots. The fact that in the early game you really value picking up heavy armor on a shapeshifter and just wearing that makes it so that it’s hard to transition into Maw form or Anaconda form as well, especially since any enchants you get are likely going on the piece of armor you can actually use if you’re sticking with beast form, so the player ends up being pretty motivated to drop the shapeshifting in a lot of cases.
I don’t have a perfect solution for any of this, but I do think that beast form having training/gearing incentives very counter to the other non-blade-forms makes it much harder to actually use on a character, especially because of the heavy skill investment into shapeshifting.